Saturday, November 16, 2013

This post builds somewhat off my last thought. I
introduced the idea of coherence generating mechanisms. These are tools meant
to synthesize and understand some underlying pattern in the context of social
phenomenon. In the realm of music, you can think about Pandora. Via a feedback
system, it seeks to hone directly into ones preferences. The more I like
R&B songs, the more the system understands that I have a preference for
them. The brain also fits this definition. It’s one big pattern recognizer,
trying its best to turn thought intensive responses into reflexive impulses.
With the rise of “big data” these systems are becoming more ubiquitous, whether
it be Google Ads or Netflix’s recommendation systems.

I think the best way to define something is to define what
it is not. My idea of coherence generating mechanisms are not simple single lag
systems. As in, they do not assume that the future will exactly mirror the
past. Thus, the system has to “learn” in some sense. It must seek to create
categories of knowledge that it calls upon to utilize in the future. Netflix’s
recommendation system fits this since it attempts to utilize both viewing
habits and ratings to pin point some locus of movie preference. Other examples
will be discussed at length below.

From the standpoint of marketers, the utility of these
mechanisms are clear. Strip away all the excess of human activity, and drill
down to some innate dispositions and preferences. While I think it is clear
people have preferences, be it liking Indian food relative Sischuanese cuisine,
I think we need to acknowledge limitations and tradeoffs associated with these
approaches. Think about listening to Pandora while you are running. This
perfect song comes on that has a beat to keep you moving. (FYI any beats above
145 BPM seem to yield little effect).
So you like that song on Pandora. Now three hours later, while sitting in your
bedroom, contemplating the reason why cars park in driveways but drive in parkways,
that same song comes on. Now in your contemplative state, that song comes off
as too much, the beat pulses through your brain disrupting your ruminative
state of mind. This situation can be easily resolved if you condition
preferences on particular states of mind. But Pandora does not know what you’re
currently in the mood for, it only knows the feedback you have generated for
it. While these systems feel intelligent, they are simply classic
stimulus-response mechanisms.

This feeling of something deeper going on in these systems
gives rise to an even more important issue, how does the user feel about this
system? What sort of confidence does the user place in it? These systems are
built to allow individuals to outsource that impossible task of introspection.
Rotten Tomatoes creates a single, unified metric for the quality of the movie.
But under the guise of arithmetic precision hides all the underlying biases of
the culture industry. Those movies that can garner reviews are the ones that
end up on the site. Furthermore, band-wagoning and other group level effects,
such as gender and racial bias, can skirt by under the false sense of security
that numbers provide. Further studies on how users come to appreciate choices
that are derived from these metrics are important, on top of, studies looking
at how users utilize these informational channels in further searching
behavior.

That the underlying metrics may be flawed does not distract
from the way these systems have the potential of opening up users to new
domains they have yet to experience. Google Maps gives me the confidence to
walk to places I have never walked to. These systems open up the landscape for
one to explore. From the perspective of learning, however, do these systems
allow the user to internalize the new environment that they are exploring?
Research into GPS systems impacts on mental visualizations shows that is not the case.
GPS technology trades off with specialized mental tasks that underlie some
important parts of cognitive development. Like exercising a muscle, the less
users utilize their mental mapping, the harder it is to get it back in gear (Here
is a short article detailing ways around this problem.)

These systems do not just have an ability to trade off with
internal resources we use, but also resources in the external world, as well. Social
communication used to be the route for recommendations in the past. Word of
mouth was the primary tool to resolve informational asymmetries in the
experiential good market. While studies have found that critic’s reviews seem
to be driving revenue generation for films, the question of what these systems
do to social ties are beyond the question of simple market analysis. Do we feel
less of a need to consult one another because we have Rotten Tomatoes at our
finger tips? Do we view our friend’s recommendations with more skepticism if
they contradict the “popular” metrics we utilize online? If your friend
constantly recommends CDs that MetaCritic deems to be terrible, does your
friendship suffer?

These are just a small sample of possible negative
implications of outsourcing our own internal pattern seeking, or coherence
generating, mechanisms. The ultimate question from an economic science
perspective is do the benefits outweigh the costs. While I believe at the end
of the day that most do, the lack of attention to some of the negative
ramifications of these systems should cause pause when attempting to run your
own cost-benefit analysis.

Monday, November 11, 2013

I decided to try and squelch some of my more ADD tendencies,
so I shut off all outside distraction, turned the lights down, and got to
listening to the new Arcade Fire album while perched on my bed. Letting my mind
wander, I started to pick up subtle nuances as the album developed. The melody
slowly rising and overtaking the struggling Wynn Butler who seems early on in
the album to be at war with the instrumentals, attempting to make his voice
have meaning over the cacophony of sound. I thought to myself the lay out of
this album is masterful, the transitions work beautifully, it builds from start
to finish, just to come all crashing down as the first side ends. But this post
is not about my feelings persay, it’s about the sense of coherence one feels
when listening to an album in its entirety (which I will admit I didn’t even do
since I stopped at the first side, my ADD sometimes always win out.)

Is the feeling of coherence intrinsic to the album itself?
Most musicians and those around music would say definitely. The songs are placed
in their order for some thematic reason that the authors have some privileged
access to. It could be stylistic as in building up tempo, or it could be
thematic as in many of the Killers’ early albums, taking you through a journey
of pain and loss, ending on a bitter and exhausted note. What if a band such as
Arcade Fire were to generate 40 songs and then dump them on their label who
then have the job of ordering and building up a theme? Would the coherence one
may feel from this be less valid than the coherence one feels from an album
constructed coherently by the author? Do creation and construction live in
separate realms?

To understand this question, one must look from where
coherence comes from. For all the best laid plans a band has, people are fickle with
regards to feeling how you want them to. The coherence of theme may be lost for
the coherence of melody and tempo. In fact, single songs are sometimes put into
coherent narratives by our own personal coherence generating mechanism, our
brains. Many people experience the feeling of having their Ipod on shuffle, or
listening to the radio, and that perfect song coming on at just the right
moment. The song order was fundamentally random with no underlying structure,
yet you the observer felt some deeper meaning in the songs arrival in your
personal arc. In fact, many people hope to discover new connections in their
music repertoire with external coherence generating mechanisms, such as ITunes
Genius and Pandora. These systems attempt to synthesize an underlying coherence
of the listener’s music tastes and map them onto either new or already existing
songs within the listener’s repertoire.

Now it seems that I have come to divide creation and
construction as two separate realms, in that construction can be reconstruction
by the observers, the consumers of music. But this same reconstructing of
narratives that listeners do, is the same sort of reconstruction bands do as
they are creating albums, and songs. The tempo, notes, and beats of stanzas are
constantly being morphed, blended, discarded, folded into larger themes,
melodies, cadences of songs, which are then recombined, spliced, manipulated,
lengthened into full-fledged albums with their own arcs, narratives and
meta-structures. But is this process linear, does it build from stanza, to song
to album without any feedback between these interlocking steps?

Music occupies a particular human world of creative
expression. Though it is unique, it falls within the realm of human cognition
and I think the answer to this quandary may lie there. A simple analogy to the
process of language production may be illuminating. Whenever one blurts out
something to their friend about how grand their day was, what comes first the
meaning of the message or the content used to convey said meaning? Many people
instinctively say that meaning comes first, for without the meaning, why would
we express that particular phrase? But if the meaning came first, what language
was the meaning in? If it was in English, then isn’t the meaning already in
words, so where did the words come from to give to the meaning. Many
researchers have come down on the side of the co-relationship between meaning
and content. Both simultaneously constrain one another.

The vocabulary we have
at our disposal affects the meanings that we express and vice versa. There’s a
reason people who speak more than one language often talk about thinking, or
reasoning in another language so as to resolve some problem. Linguistic
constraints beget reasoning constraints (Dennett, 247). Oliver Sachs has a
wonderful, reporting of the constraining aspects of linguistic mediums:

“Communication by motor behavior became a very important
part of the transference…[W]ithout knowing it, I was receiving two sets of
communication simultaneously: one in words, a form in which the patient
ordinarily communicated with me; the other in gestures [signs], as the patient
used to communicate with his father. At other times in the transference, the
motor symbols represented a gloss upon the verbal text the patient was
communicating. These motor symbols contained additional material which either
augmented or more likely contradicted what was being communicated verbally. In
a sense, “unconscious material” was making its appearance in consciousness by
way of motor rather by way of verbal communication (Sachs, 34).”

Transference is a bit much for me, but it is clear that the mode
with which reasoning is articulated and rehearsed affects the thoughts that are
produced. Verbal and motor communicative structures are different and can
construct thoughts in ways that are sometimes at odds. The abacus and
calculator are two different methods for the same goal “calculation”, yet the
mechanisms used and results generated can diverge.

This same sort of feedback between meaning and
content can be seen in the relationships between albums, songs, and their
listeners. While the artist may be developing the album, the album is also
being particularized in songs, and once those songs are developed they
themselves determine where the album is going. This is why outlining is such an
important part in the writing process. For all the jumbles in one’s heads, an
outline helps to particularize and focus those disparate connections into some
sequential process. Once the album is created, the meaning of the artist is now
supplanted by the meaning of the listener. The listener brings in their own personal
narrative, but those are themselves constrained by the content of the album.
There is a reason people do not usually feel particularly sad listening to a
Katy Perry album, the content to derive that meaning is not there. The
construction/creation divide (or more generally the form/content divide) is
less a divide and more of an ecosystem of production that highlights the multilayered
process of reasoning. -----------------------------------------------------------References:Dennett, D. Unconcsiousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company: Boston. 1991.Sachs, O. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf. Harper Collins: New York. 1990.